a DIY wedding adventure, amongst other excuses…

10 months that now see me a happily married woman; a passport stamped traveller; a certified reiki practitioner; a ‘quit my job to work out what on earth I actually want to do’ educator; a body with sore legs and arms after getting a personal trainer; and an artist trepidatiously negotiating the path back to art and creativity.

That last one is the reason why I am back here on this here blog again, after considering its official closure many times in those 10 months. So, please excuse me if I stagger along a little and am less than coherent…I feel like I’ve just woken up.

Our wedding was a big country affair which took over the entire town of Jamieson in Victoria. It was casual and friendly and every single person pitched in and helped, which is exactly how we wanted it to be.

It was also very DIY. Of course I wanted it to be DIY, I couldn’t help but drool over the hundreds of wedding blogs out there displaying beautiful and thoughtful DIY wedding touches. However, unlike many of them, I had limited time (we were engaged for 7 months), limited funds, limited hands and towards the end I felt so frazzled by the whole shebang that I’m certain at some point I refered to it as “that bloody wedding”. Which is why I chose not to blog my every wedding move and turn this into my very own frilly vintage inspired birds and bike wheels glue-gun filled DIY wedding blog.

But, despite all that, our wedding turned out to be the most wonderful experience and P and I couldn’t have been happier with how it all came together.

Here are some of the DIY aspects of the ‘do…

The cakes:

After resolutely ignoring the looming inevitability of getting a cake made, my dear mother suggested that seeing as my sister L and I had been somewhat of a baking duo in the past (until she moved overseas) why couldn’t we simply make the cake? And so we did. simple as that. Ha! not quite that simple, but really, despite there being some tears over butter cream over in wedding cake HQ (not mine), it wasn’t as stressful as it could have been and I ended up with the result I had planned all along.

Instead of a large tiered cake, we decided to create a deconstructed wedding cake consisting of 3 different cakes all clustered together on wooden tree stumps. There were several video chat conversations across hemispheres where we deliberated the sizes we would need to feed 120 people, as well as appropriate icing, recipes and methods of transporting them 300 km once they were made. In the end we decided on two 30cm round cakes and one 40cm round. These sizes ended up being more than adequate and continued to feed the 100 or so people who turned up to the bbq the next day.

For the two smaller we made a Filbert Genoise (hazelnut sponge) from the book Great Cakes by Carole Walter, although we found it online via L’s daring bakers challenge, and a butter cake from Delicious magazine. The largest cake was a butterscotch chocolate cake also from Delicious. All three cakes were relatively easy to make, with L and myself spending one entire day 3 days before the wedding madly mixing and baking, and L frosted them using a butter cream icing on the day before. True to form, I only decorated the cake with the acorns (not planned, I just found a tree) 1 hour before I had to start getting dressed on the actual day.

The tree stumps were locally sourced, although I cannot remember the actual type of wood at this point in time.

The flowers:

were put together by my own parents from a selection of flowers that were bought from florists, grown by my dad, and picked from generous friend’s gardens.

My shawl

was made for me by my talented sister L (who by the time the wedding came round was having wedding-inspired fever dreams). I’m not sure which pattern she used, but if she will tell me, I shall post it.

Other items I don’t have photos of are:

the bunting which I used to create an aisle. That was put together using triangles cut from calico and patterned quilting fabric, iron on hemming tape, ribbon and some wooden stakes.

the flower vases for the reception which I created by hot-glueing brown string all around mason jars (and consequently hot-glueing off my fingertips in the process).

and the amazing food which was all made by my father-in-law, Andrew Dwyer.

I should also point out that all the photos in this post were taken by our photographer, Freddy Leong.

So, hopefully that distracts some of you enough to forgive me (because I know someone is still visiting here…) and has led me through the first-awkward-blog-post-in-a-long-time issue. I promise from here on in I shall be back for often, sooner than say, 10 months.

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4 thoughts on “a DIY wedding adventure, amongst other excuses…”

Congratulations, and you look gorgeous and happy together. We had a bit of a DIY wedding too and it was more relaxed for everyone too. You have been busy – change does that to a girl. And yes, I’d be interested in the pattern for the shawl. It is lovely.

I love a DIY wedding. I think doing things yourself makes the whole day a lot more unique and means you can call in favours from friends and get things that are a lot more personal. I absolutely love your cakes, your knitted shawl and the whole look of the wedding. Congratulations

For the knitters out there it was a fun and reasonably easy knit, but wonderfully effective. I used a 2/36NM 50/50 cashmere silk blend I got from colourmart.com, held double because it that yarn is even thinner than a normal laceweight.